Tag: favorite books by month

Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, Robin Coste Lewis. Good grief, everyone should read these poems. Really so pleased and delighted that Lewis received the National Book Award for this. Very well-deserved. (With thanks to Wei for giving us a copy.)

Hold Still, Sally Mann. Difficult and beautiful and strange all at once. I felt a particular bond with Mann, owing to the fact that she lives about an hour from here, in the green, rolling paradise that is the Virginia countryside.

Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. Why did I wait so long to read these letters? Silly of me. Should be required reading/inspiration for writers.

The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene. Greene always surprises me. I tend to expect something stuffy from him, which is unfair, and then he eludes me.

As We Are Now, May Sarton. An unflinching and yet moving portrait of a dying woman, locked away and seemingly forgotten in a nursing home, who is striving to stay human and sane.

The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal. What a crazy, unexpectedly fun romp through the Napoleonic era! We follow the air-headed romantic Fabrizio, who is constantly saved from death/torture/exile by women.

The Stories of John Cheever. What is wrong with me that I waited so long in my life to read John Cheever? Good grief. These stories wrecked me. I don’t think I’ve ever read a more thrilling and perfect collection of short stories. They stuck with me; I think about them still all the time.

A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara. Good grief. I almost hesitate to recommend it, because of how intense it is, but wow, what a novel. It eats you alive. And it’s fully deserving of all of the accolades and nominations it has been raking in lately.

Stuart: A Life Backwards, Alexander Masters. A gripping, unusual biography and a riveting portrait of homelessness in England.

Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut. This is the sort of thing I should have read in high school, but I am glad I finally got around to it; so surprisingly funny in all of its bleakness.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston. This was my second time with this novel (read it again for my church book club), and it was just as dazzling and powerful the second time around. Notably, I felt struck by what an important feminist novel it is.

The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty, Soetsu Yanagi. This book, a series of philosophical essays on Korean and Japanese folk art, so perfectly captures all that I adore about Japanese aesthetics. I am dying to go back to Japan and fill up an entire suitcase with ceramics.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West. This tome is so deeply worth it. Rebecca West travels throughout the former Yugoslavia and the Balkans on the brink of World War II and writes about the region and its history with such beauty, wit, and strength. Highly, highly recommended.

Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, May Sarton. I knew from the first sentence that I’d love this novel, and I was right. The dialogue flags in places, but it’s beautifully composed, and the characters are extremely memorable and strong. This is the first book of Sarton’s that I’ve read, and I’m looking forward to reading many more.

White Girls, Hilton Als. Bold and occasionally inscrutable essays by a powerful writer. I particularly enjoyed his perspective on Flannery O’Connor, and the essay about André Leon Talley was pitch-perfect and heartbreaking by turns.

A Life in Letters, Anton Chekhov. Collected correspondence from Chekhov’s life, which shines a light on his humor and very human genius.

Coup de Grâce, Marguerite Yourcenar. This is the third novel of Yourcenar’s that I’ve read, and I’m increasingly convinced that she’s perfect. Her psychological analysis is unmatched. This tiny novel is narrated by an egotistical young Prussian who is in love/hate with a damaged and yet strong young woman.

The Story of a New Name, Elena Ferrante. If you can’t tell, summer 2015 is the year of dueling masterful series for me: Knausgaard and Ferrante, Ferrante and Knausgaard. I am reading them both breathlessly, in quick succession. This is book two of the Neapolitan Novels series, and it’s just as dazzling as the first, although a heckuva lot darker.

Victory Over Japan: Stories, Ellen Gilchrist. I’d never heard of Gilchrist before, but this was a completely charming and engrossing series of stories featuring powerful, memorable Southern women in starring roles. A lovely summer read, actually. I am usually reading very seasonally inappropriate books, but I’d recommend this to someone for a beach vacation.

H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald. Stop everything and go read this book. It entranced me completely. Macdonald is a masterful writer, and she held me in her spell for the entirety of this gorgeously written book — part grief memoir, part goshawk guide, part meditation on the beauty and mortality of the natural world.

My Struggle, Book 1, Karl Ove Knausgaard. The Norwegian Proust! It is everything everyone says it is (magnificent, breathtaking, compelling, mystifying). I read it on the plane to and from Iceland, and it made that sum total of 12 hours in air feel like a beautiful passing minute.

Mislaid, Nell Zink. Bizarre and impeccably told. The New Yorker profile on Nell Zink made me intensely curious about her, and I devoured this novel, her most recent, with great fervor. The frequent references to the University of Virginia and the Virginia countryside, in which I reside, were also delightful.

Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood, Steven Mintz. I’ve always found American history interesting, and this is a particularly interesting history textbook. Steven Mintz covers the movements within American childhood (and parenting) from the Puritans to Columbine High School. It’s extremely fascinating. We’ve come a long way, regarding children, and we’ve changed our collective minds about them over and over again.

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy; translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. This is the third time I’ve read AK, and it never fails to please and delight. Read for my church book club. I love the way that this novel, after centuries, still has the power to enchant and enrage readers (our book club was divided strongly into pro- and anti-Anna camps). I think it’s an immortal work of art.

Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, ed. Meghan Daum. I’ll probably still have kids, Mom, but it was intensely interesting to read a variety of perspectives on why people choose not to have them. I read this book in a sitting, with great focus, on my deck. It was only after I’d finished that I looked up and thought, The only reason I was able to read this book in one breathless sitting is precisely because I do not have children. So there’s that. The women’s perspectives, naturally, were more resonant with me on a theoretical level, but the three men’s essays were the funniest and most lighthearted on the topic (probably because men, biologically and culturally, can be more laissez-faire about childrearing).

Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald. I’m not sure if I really get German literature, but this was beautiful and unusual, even if the prose was murky and dark at times. The photographs were so fascinating to me.

For whatever reason, I apparently didn’t read as much in May as I did in April. These were the best books I read last month.

Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint, Nadia-Bolz Weber. After hearing Bolz-Weber speak at Mockingbird in April, I felt completely hooked and bought Pastrix as soon as the conference concluded. Part memoir, part testimony, Pastrix chronicles Bolz-Weber’s journey to believe, become sober, and start a church in Denver. Highly recommended.

The Sellout, Paul Beatty. Uncomfortably raucous, Beatty presents a scathing satire of race relations in America, imagining a narrator who decides to re-segregate his California town and take an old black man as his slave.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert. The world is ending, and Kolbert has the science to prove it. A grim but well-written account of how humans are hurtling the planet toward the next great extinction. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Thousand Cranes, Yasunari Kawabata. I come back to Kawabata over and over again for his lovely, spare, luminous prose. He writes such sad, distant characters, but I am drawn in by them time and time again. I particularly enjoyed the rushes of nostalgia for these places in Japan, specifically Kamakura, and for the gorgeous traditions of Japanese art and tea.